Dr. Shiva Devkota — thank you. This draft answers the practical questions: what we build, who owns what, and how the money moves.
Three things, kept deliberately separate: a business we own together, a scientific society you lead, and the engineering team that builds for both. And two platforms, not one — yours and ours. Each has a clear owner, and nothing in the science depends on what the business sells.
You want a home for mycologists — a place where researchers join, publish, find funding and are taken seriously. We want MoreFungi to be the most trusted name in mushrooms. Those are the same project, as long as the money and the science never sit in the same pocket. So we keep three parts separate.
The B2B channel that is live today — wholesale, distribution and private label. It also builds and maintains software, starting with the Society's own platform, and that work is part of what it earns from.
A non-profit registered in Nepal, chaired by you. Mycologists join, publish research, apply for grants, review each other's work. It is a scientific body, not a shop — and it gets its own platform.
Engineers, designers and the infrastructure both platforms run on. We have built and run this kind of software for years. We work through MoreFungi — we are not a third party taking a cut on the side.
We would rather write this down now, plainly, than discover we meant different things in a year.
We register MoreFungi as a company with two shareholders: you and MoreTech Global, fifty-fifty. Not a handshake — a real company, with your name on it. Every lead, every wholesale order, every private-label project it brings in is split down the middle after costs.
In practice: MoreFungi earns 20% on the sales it generates, and because the company is ours half each, 10% of those sales reaches you — exactly the number in the first draft. What changed is that it is now yours by ownership rather than by promise. Every other thing MoreFungi earns, including the Society's maintenance agreement, is split the same way.
Grants, research funding and donations belong to the Society. It keeps a standard administrative share of each grant — the 10–20% that every research organisation keeps to run itself — and that share stays inside the Society, paying for its staff, its tools and its work.
This is not modesty, it is what makes it fundable. No serious foundation will fund a non-profit that pays a slice of its grants to a private company. Keeping our hands off it is what lets you go after the big money.
The Society needs its own software: members and profiles, submissions, peer review, funding calls, events. MoreFungi builds it — and the Society holds an annual maintenance agreement with MoreFungi for it: hosting, support, security, and the improvements each year brings.
That fee is MoreFungi's income, which means it is already half yours. Not a side arrangement, not a separate invoice from a software company you have never met — it lands in the company we own together. What it buys is continuity: a developer who is still there in year three, when the platform matters most.
Set against what the Society actually is: small while it is small, growing as its membership and its funded work grow. A young society should never be paying like an institution — and a well-funded one should be paying for more than one developer.
This is where it is easy to get confused, so here it is plainly. Your Society gets its own platform, which it owns and MoreFungi maintains. MoreFungi separately builds its own product — the public mushroom platform. They help each other, but they are two different things with two different owners.
The working tool of a scientific organisation. It belongs to the Society. Its data is the Society's data. MoreFungi is its software partner, nothing more.
Mycologists join, with real credentials, publications and research interests. Applications, membership, and a directory the world can search and cite.
Submit work, review each other's, and keep a permanent record of who contributed what. The administration a society drowns in, done by software instead of email.
Open calls, applications, assessment, and reporting back to the funder. The paperwork that decides whether a grant is renewed.
Registration and payment for the things the Society runs — conferences, training, expeditions — so the income arrives without anyone chasing it.
The public one: a mushroom platform for the world, and the long-term value in the company we own together. Your Society's members are its expert reviewers, credited by name, and their standing grows with it.
Wholesale, distribution and private label, with species pages and articles that carry a named reviewer and cited sources. It already works — it is waiting for authors.
Every mushroom-forming fungus with usable data: taxonomy, common names in many languages, morphology, habitat, edibility, toxins, lookalikes, conservation status — every fact with a source and a reviewer.
Where each species has been recorded, and when it appears, computed from dated records. Starting with the Himalaya, where your data and your network are unmatched.
Suggestions, never verdicts. It will never tell anyone a mushroom is safe to eat, it will always show dangerous lookalikes, and no species fact behind it will ever be machine-written. That rule is not negotiable, and we would want you enforcing it.
Web first, then iOS and Android. English and Nepali, then the European languages. A Himalayan mycologist's work, read everywhere.
This is the product that earns — and it earns for both of us. It is what lets MoreFungi keep a developer on your Society's platform in the years when grants are slow.
Anyone can open a mushroom shop. Very few can stand behind one with real mycology. Everything above only works because the science is genuinely yours — so the first steps are the ones only you can take.
You chair it. Its board decides its science and its funding. MoreFungi sits on it as the software partner without a veto, and the Society can replace it like any supplier.
Selling the company, taking on investment, changing the splits, or using your name and likeness commercially — none of it happens without both of us agreeing in writing.
Articles and research you publish are jointly owned for use on the MoreFungi platform, and remain yours to publish, cite and build on anywhere else, forever. Anything your members put on the Society's platform belongs to the Society alone.
If either of us wants out, the other buys the share at an independently valued price. The Society continues regardless — it is not ours to close.
This is a draft, not a contract. Read it, argue with it, tell us what is wrong or missing — especially about the Society, which should be shaped the way a scientist would want it, not the way a software company imagines it. When it reads right to you, we prepare the registration and the agreement.